The World Wide Web has expanded to provide web services faster to consumers. Web services may be provided by a web application which uses one or more services to handle a transaction. The applications may be distributed over several machines, making the topology of the machines that provides the service more difficult to track and monitor.
Monitoring of application performance has become vital to businesses that rely on web-based applications for services and revenue. Monitoring the performance of an application may include determining how long a particular request takes, the response time of a request, and other application performance monitoring metrics. These metrics provide a decent overview of the performance of an application running on a particular machine.
Many operating systems allow an interface for determining the current CPU usage and memory usage for the particular machine. Though useful, this information is nearly always out of context and is not very useful by itself. There is no means for determining the actual effect of the usage on the performance of software running on the machine.
What is needed is an improved method for informing an administrator of the performance of an application managed by the administrator.